Getting Hacked Sucks (And Other Observances)

I woke up to pee at about 1am on Wednesday. A normal occurrence, frequent even given my tiny bladder and penchant for hydration, but then this middle of the night wee ended up anything but normal as it sparked a four plus hour long clean up of my internet presence.

A friend had texted me saying it looked like my blog had been hacked. The nonchalance of that text is utterly bewildering now, looking back on how frantic I was after receiving it, changing passwords and scouring profiles for damages. Someone had gotten into my WordPress account (this very place!) and scheduled a post as me, the Administrator, a link to gods know what (but something very porny sounding), and then that went out.

This blog posts directly to my Facebook page as well as to Twitter, so the hacker’s post went out to pretty much my entire audience. Thankfully (I guess), very few people actually pay attention to me, so it only reached a couple people (some of whom liked the post, blindly I assume, but still…weird), but it still feels really violating and frankly pisses me off. What does anyone have to gain from screwing up my blog? I know I wasn’t hand selected, and it was probably just a program or bot that did all the work, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing that someone’s goal is to take away someone else’s security and platform for personal gain.

So I used the momentum and fear from fixing my site to go ahead and change pretty much all my passwords everywhere. That was time consuming, tedious, and enraging as I found that I have so many logins to so many useless sites, but deleting your account in a lot of places is nigh impossible. I went back to bed sometime around 5am feeling sad and mad and just bummed out in general Lack of sleep does that, but so does disappointment in the world in general.

So this week’s been kind of off for me, hence the late post, but I’ve still been working. My second book, She’s All Thaumaturgy, gets ever closer to completion, and I’m pretty sure I’m still on track for a late May 2020 release. If you like dragons or late 90s/early 00s Freddie Prinze Jr., I think you’ll like this one. I’ve also been looking for reviewers for The Korinniad but that’s an ongoing process. The initial surge she got from being free has worn off, so now she’s floundering. That was expected, but still annoying to see.

I’m also working on another AuthorTube video, this one on chapter length and revisions. Just something simple and quick, and not meant to guide others, but to share experience. It’d be nice to have another place to discuss the process and maybe craft with people, and to figure out how to reach readers. So many platforms are just authors talking to other authors, and that’s great, but how the hell do we reach people who want to absorb our work?

So all this is to say, I don’t have very much interesting or fun to say this week, but I do want to apologize for the crappy link a couple of you probably saw from the hack. Hopefully that won’t happen again going forward, especially now that I have a semblance of something to lose. Now I’ll just trudge on with writing, fingers crossed that having a backlog is all I’ve read it’s cracked up to be.